Monday, September 24, 2012

The Sweet Girl: Annabel Lyon’s last volume on Ancient Greece

Mercifully, Annabel Lyon has left her iPhone in her hotel room, which renders her unable to display a treasured photograph of the Iron Age vaginal dilator she snapped in a museum while visiting Athens to research her latest novel, a sequel to 2009’s award-winning, bestselling The Golden Mean.

“It’s horrifying!” she exults, spreading her arms to show the size of the fearful artifact, technically known as a speculum. “And it’s got this big screw on it, and it’s just ohh….” The novelist shudders.

“And I loved it, of course.”

Lyon loved it so much that she made the instrument a crucial prop in her new novel, The Sweet Girl, which returns to the ancient Greek world of philosophers and kings that she brought to life so successfully in The Golden Mean. But as the lovable speculum suggests, this is “a very different book” from her speculative biography of Aristotle, Lyon says. Chronicling the adventures of the philosopher’s precocious daughter after his death, The Sweet Girl is yin to the former book’s yang.

Whereas The Golden Mean focused on men and public life – “politics, warfare, science and reason and all of that,” according to the author – The Sweet Girl is “much more female, much more interior.”